


Following Morning

by sidonay



Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 21:25:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7817890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You alright?” There is concern, real and almost solid in the space between them.</p><p>“He’s gone,” Fiore says and the words taste like blood in his mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Following Morning

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something else for this fandom but I didn't have any ideas and then... this happened.
> 
> That's really all I can say.

There’s a layer of dust that coats the back of his throat and no matter how much he coughs or spits or drinks it never seems to wash away. It’s under his fingernails, smudged on his cheeks and he scrubs with the water from a gas station bathroom, ignores the quirked eyebrow of the man who gives him the key, watching as he stumbles, winds around the snaked hoses dripping with gasoline, lugging the trunk behind him.

He scrubs his pale flesh raw and aching but it doesn’t fade.

The dirt from Hell is far more stubborn than most.

“Where’s your vehicle?” The attendant asks him when Fiore returns the key.

“Don’t have one,” Fiore says and his voice sounds hoarse, tired. He’s filthy, can smell the brimstone in his clothes and he wonders if the man standing across from him has the same stench curling up through his wide nose. “Bus.” Just the one word. _Bus_.

“Anything else I can do for you?” It’s asked gruffly, no meaningful emotion behind it. _No_ , Fiore wants to say, feels the consonant and vowel resting on the back of his tongue. _Not unless you’re a demon, too. Not unless you can get me another red stained ticket_. It’s unlikely. He’d be able to feel the darkness buried under his ribs, the aura of pitch black smoke.

(DeBlanc had it, too. Fiore thought it was beautiful in a sick sort of way, had asked if there was something like that as well for him and DeBlanc had blinked at him, made a circle with his fingers. _Light_ , he had said, _Brilliant light_.)

“No,” Fiore says. “Nothing else.” He hesitates though, curls fingers in weak fists, shakes his head.

“You alright, kid?” Kid? A child. Did he look that young? He didn’t feel it. Fiore was almost as old as the land they stood on and it was something was very keenly aware of right then, age cracking in the wrinkles of his useless human skin.

“I’m lost,” Fiore says.

“Here,” the attendant says, reaches past Fiore with a thick arm towards a rusty metal rack display, picks up folded paper with worn edges and sun bleached words, holds it towards Fiore’s chest, “Have a map.”

 

. . . .

 

Faded yellow ground, criss-crossed roads, street names stamped in black, this neighborhood, that neighborhood, there’s a highway, a dead end, creases bent white. It doesn’t make sense.

 _Doesn’t make sense_. DeBlanc’s voice.

Fiore is sweating as he sits on a bench, tries to refold the map but it won’t go back the way it had come; it was neat when handed to him but now it was uneven, crooked, lopsided.

Fiore could relate.

 

. . . .

 

Exhaustion settles around his bones, twisted like thorny vines and his chest rattles when he breathes. He lays down on the bench, tucks his hands under his head but then pulls one free, fingertips touching the stone sidewalk. He thinks he can feel the vibration of something dangerous just there, under concrete and dirt.

The trip hadn’t been farther than he thought.

 

. . . .

 

Waste away, waste away. Starve to death on a Texas bench.

It wouldn’t matter. There was no significance in his demise.

He’d come back, here or somewhere else. If he was lucky, the stink of Hell would be gone.

But since when has luck ever been on his side?

 

. . . .

 

He walks back to the gas station. It’s only a few hours later, the sun low in the late evening sky and the same attendant is standing behind the counter. He looks sincerely surprised to see Fiore again, lifts his balding head, turning a can of perspiring soda, the metal tap, tap, tapping in tune with the whir of the plastic fan behind him in front of a wall of cigarettes.

“It didn’t work,” Fiore says, slaps the map down, points at it, speaks through clenched teeth.

“What the heck do you mean ‘it didn’t work’?”

“I don’t understand it,” he says.

“It’s a map,” the man says, chuckles, “Nobody does.” He sighs, picks it up, pulls it apart, stretches it out on the counter top. “Where are you trying to go?”

“Hell,” Fiore tells him honestly. The man laughs, waits for Fiore to be serious but he already is, says nothing else, and the man grimaces.

“The closest we have to Hell around here is Annville, but that place is gone.”

“Gone?”

“You haven’t heard? Whole town just up and fell into the earth. One minute it’s there and the next…” He snaps his fingers. He shakes his head. “Damn shame, all those people dead.” Finger jabs at the map again, pulls along a nameless road. “Where’d you come from?”

“Hell,” Fiore says, corrects it: “Annville.”

“No shit. Lucky bastard. You must have got out right before it happened, huh?” He asks but Fiore doesn’t respond. “What’s in the trunk?” He asks abruptly, nods at the big, roughed-up box that Fiore left right outside the door and Fiore feels his heart skip and he digs nails into his soft palms, scratches a pattern with his middle finger on his right hand.

“Nothing important,” Fiore responds eventually and, at that exact moment, it was the truth. There was nothing in there he could use, unless he wanted to rebuild DeBlanc out of weapons and torn pages from comics, bits and pieces of familiar trinkets that DeBlanc had thought Genesis would respond to.

There wasn’t even a ph—

“Lubbock,” Fiore says. “Where’s Lubbock?” He should be looking for Genesis, following the Preacher, feels the tug on his back like a hand forever yanking on his jacket. They’re still alive, on the move, pulling, pulling but _it doesn’t matter_. He can’t do this alone. He needs—

( _Somebody has reached a hand into his chest and pulled out a piece of his heart. That was why it rattled when he breathed. There was something missing._ )

He doesn’t know how anybody above him could help but he was willing to endure any punishment as long as one of his brethren would be on his side. He would whisper, conspire and get them to reach hands down under the boiling tar pits of Hell to pull DeBlanc out.

They would listen. Someone had to listen.

_You’re the sweet one. They love you up there._

“Lubbock,” the man repeats, leans over the map, chews on his bottom lip. “Fuck,” he says, pushes the paper away. “I hate these things. Look… uh. You have a phone?”

“No,” Fiore says. “That’s what I’m looking for.”

“Well, heck,” the man says, “You don’t have to go to Lubbock for that. Here.” He’s lifting something from underneath the counter and slides a cellphone towards him. “You seem alright. You can use it.” Fiore stares at the metal and plastic, glares at it and then picks it up, moves it from one hand to the other, puts it back down, shoves it carefully in the man’s direction. “You’re a strange one, you know that?” A low exhale that smells sour.

DeBlanc had always been better at dealing with humans. Fiore had no patience for them.

The dirt on his face is burning and he rubs at it absently.

He’s smeared in Hell and there’s a hole a mile wide inside him. How could anybody understand that?

“You alright?” The second time that question had been put forth to him today from the same mouth. There is concern this time, real and almost solid in the space between them.

“He’s gone,” Fiore says and the words taste like blood in his mouth.

“Who is?” A pause. Consideration. “You lose someone?”

 _Someone_. He hasn’t lost ‘someone’. He’s lost everything.

“Yes,” he says.

“Sorry to hear that,” the man replies, leans forward to pat a large hand on Fiore’s shoulder. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Shit, son. Were they in Annville?”

“Underneath it,” Fiore says, confirms.

“Well, I’d imagine they would be now,” The man says, tactless, and Fiore doesn’t know how to respond so he says nothing, the silence filled by a mournful whine of a truck horn as it coughs out blue and black smoke as it rolls down the dusty road. “You know, they say workers are trying to dig up the rubble. Might find him. The body at least.” Another stretch of quiet. Another truck. “There’s a motel in town here. Might want to stick around, just in case.” A throat being cleared. “You sure you don’t want to use my phone? You have nobody you want to talk to? To call about what happened?”

“No,” Fiore says. _Yes_ , he means, but he wouldn’t get anywhere by fumbling with his device. “I should go.”

“Alright. Well, hey, listen… I’m George,” he says to Fiore’s back and Fiore hesitates. “If you decide to stick around… I ain’t going anywhere. If you need anything.”

He has nothing Fiore could possibly want.

“Okay,” Fiore says, moving back outside into the heat and the heavy clouds hiding a slowly setting sun. Eyes closing, he touches the trunk, smooths fingers around its edges, breathes in and out, hears the rattle in his chest, feels it, brushes dirty hands over his clothes, the brim of his hat, under the collar of his shirt.

He looks up (there is anger inside him but some things never change, old habits forever difficult to break) and asks the sky: “What should I do?”

Minutes pass. He feels the attendant watching him. There is no answer.

Fiore almost laughs at himself, at the fact that he thought he might get one (a voice murmuring sweetly to him, words like a caress on his cheek) if only he waited patiently enough.

_Of course not._

He leaves the trunk behind and starts to walk.


End file.
